August 2009

- We had bought a PUR Water Filter last year. We were happy with the filtered water, but didn't like the lack of head-room in the sink - having that screwed on limits the size of items you can get under the faucet.

- Google wants to help you monetize your website. In Google Labs now is The Google Checkout store gadget , which lets you imbed a spreadsheet driven widget on your site to sell whatever you are selling. That includes digital goods, though for now Google lacks the sophistication of sites like E-Junkie .

- Around 1:00 AM Sunday morning I was awakened by a car alarm and laughter. It went on long enough to get me out of bed and to the window, but was just noisy party-goers leaving a neighbors house and accidentally setting off the alarm. I crawled back to bed, but couldn't drop back into my dreams

- What I do like is the state of being PMR - "Pretty much retired". That's where you work pretty much when you want to, take time off pretty much when you want, and generally try to lead a relaxed and stress free life. I've been "pretty much" in that state for five years or more and I have to say I like it - a lot.

- Programming is about dotting the 'i's and crossing the 't's. Programming is about sitting and coding till sweat and blood forms on the forehead. Jokes aside, in today's world knowledge is power. Knowledge has always been a source of power and joy for ages but in the Internet age, it assumes a lot more relevance and meaning.

- The moment you hear the term p2p, the first thing that comes to your mind will mostly be BitTorrent. It is a fantastic file sharing protocol and in a way it rewrote the way we have always understood file transfers on the Internet. Curious geeks can refer to this detailed specification to understand how the protocol works. It is advanced technology and a brilliant way to solve the age old problem of scalability and web traffic overloads which have crashed the best of web servers.

- Realizing the potential of a technology is key to success. You also have to be quick at realizing the potential of humans...then only you can employ good people and grow. The insight you get in learning various technologies will help you in a big way

- I was NOT on-line last night, actually reading a book instead, when my wife comes downstairs saying that our computer is telling her that it has been infected with spyware and that we NEED to download some software to fix that.

- Creating video tutorials is a novel method of web based tutoring. Nowadays right from product demos for marketing/sales to technical talks, everything is found in youtube. Videos are a powerful medium to get your idea across and your audience can quickly understand what you are trying to convey when they see a video.

- When the Web 2.0 happened and Ajax entered the picture, things got even more interesting. Google maps zooming and fetching content on the fly and several rich Internet applications became not only a possibility but also a certainty with everything moving to the web. Be it document creation, photo sharing or even remote desktop.

- Most ebooks get little exposure outside of the website that promotes them, but that's all about to change. Google Books wants those e-books. It wants to index them and provide search options within their text.

- Hackers are not boring people with no interest in women and with women having nothing of interest in them. Hackers love fun too except that their idea of fun is bit different. Let us take a look at the ASCII art generation program figlet first.

- If I have $100,000 and you have a hundred million, we both can afford to buy a cup of coffee. In fact, for most things that matter and quite a few that don't, we're pretty equal - right up until you want to buy that Ferrari Enzo.

- For many people unfamiliar with the open source culture, its ecosystem and values, the very motivation behind giving away one's sweat and blood and tears at no cost whatsoever...sounds illogical. This article is an attempt to figure out what motivates people to relinquish profits and commercial intent and suffer its consequences.

- I hope that this is a sign of good things to come for our U.S. economy: Adsense revenues at this site have started to improve. They aren't yet anything like they used to be, but the trend does seem to be up, so I've decided to reinstate revenue sharing and have changed my Publishing your articles here page to show that.

- Google has had channels for some time. With some effort, you could get an idea of how well certain sections or types of ads were doing, but unless your site was very small or you used third party tools like Asrep, you couldn't really tell how individual pages contributed to your income.

- This call happened to be for an old SCO Unix system, but really it could have been for anything: Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, it would have all been the same. An old server had an OS transplant and needed to be connected to the network.

- There is a certain commonality to be found amongst geeks, nerds or hackers. I know people like to differentiate between these different words but we are talking about really smart programmers and technologists. It could also mean scientists, engineers or individuals who can create great technology.

- My wife and I were watching "3:10 to Yuma" (violent and predictable, but far from the worse we've watched recently) and when we noticed Peter Fonda in the credits, my wife couldn't recognize who he had played. Well, of course he's gotten a bit older over the years, and his role barely mattered anyway, so that wasn't surprising. After we dug back and figured out which character was his, I commented that in a few years we'll probably start seeing computer generated actors resurrect stars of the past.

- Network forensic analysis is towing the thin line between hacking and cracking. We are not interested in prying into other people's or other network's innards. But you can use such tools for several useful applications without intruding into other's privacy.

- This lets prospective buyers read sample pages easel and search for topics of interest before they decide to buy. It also increases exposure: if someone happens to find one of these in a Google search, they'll have the same ability and will be directed here to buy.

- It's plain that privacy will soon be entering the realm of thought and intention. We're already testing or using software at airports that attempts to identify bad intent from biometrics and behavior. How long will it be before your local Quickie-Mart scans you as you walk from your car and locks the door or at least alerts personnel that you might not be coming for a lottery ticket and a cup of coffee?

- Unsolicited bulk e-mail(UBE) or unsolicited commercial e-mail(UCE) is what is commonly known as spam. Spam nowadays has become such a common word that we use it with wikis, with online mail ID creation sites and so on. CAPTCHA is geared towards working around robots and programs that masquerade as humans.

- Peer to peer technology is going to take over client server model the same way data took over traditional voice networks. Just like voice is going to be carried over data networks, we are going to have client server traffic getting carried over peer to peer architectures in the coming years.

- Learning a musical instrument takes at least 5 years. If you practice for 2 hours in the morning after bath and in the evening for another 2 hours with full devotion to Guru and its art, then you achieve some mastery over the instrument. A similar devotion is necessary when you are tackling something as abstruse and difficult as cryptography.

- Lost or stolen laptops are a privacy and security nightmare, especially for small to mid-size organizations that handle customer data and/or are bound to one of the numerous regulatory requirements. Smaller companies cannot afford the tangible and branding costs associated with breach notification or incident response. Encryption of data at rest or on mobile resources is a logistical nightmare for most businesses. Fortunately for them there is a free, open source laptop or software encryption option available in TrueCrypt.

- Ask any sys admin and you will know how often the network messes up. Every now and then we have worm attacks, traffic overloads, routing issues, reachability problems, network slowness, ssh bruteforce attacks and in addition to all of this the sys admin has to deal with Windows viruses and malware.

- The open source rrdtool project helps you create a graphical view of any statistic collected at regular intervals. This could be anything you can possibly conceive. Traffic loads on your network, hard disk DMA transfers, CPU temperature, SNMP monitoring data or even mundane stuff like your employee attrition rate or payroll details.